Eschew Eschatology

by Kelpie Wilson

Sentient Times, May 1999
www.sentienttimes.com

Recently I realized that I had just read three “end of the world” books in a row. No wonder I've been feeling depressed.

Greg Bear's The Forge of God explores the helplessly naïve reaction of humans to predatory aliens who threaten to destroy the planet. Bear’s grittily realistic characters share descriptive space with the rock and metal bones of the earth itself. You won’t believe what happens to Yosemite’s Half Dome.

Into the Forest by Jean Hegland is a more organic apocalypse, which follows the survival moves of a pair of homesteading, home-schooled teenage sisters living in the Mendocino redwoods. The sisters turn back to nature after a Y2K-like scenario cuts off all the gas and electricity. Ecotopian back-to-the-landers such as myself are easily carried away by this common fantasy of learning to eat acorns and drink fir tip tea.

Finally, the sublime Kalki by Gore Vidal, probably my favorite, is the story of a Vietnam vet turned international drug dealer turned Tibetan mystic named Kalki who predicts the end of the world and promises salvation to true believers. The action is seen through the eyes of a female test pilot who tied her tubes and wrote a book about it, a spiritual daughter to Amelia Earhart who’s become a talk show celebrity. Her commitment to non-breeding makes her attractive to Kalki who recruits her for what he thinks are his own ends.

These were all three well-crafted, worthwhile books and I’d recommend them to anyone, but I don’t recommend reading them all in a row. It’s too much, especially right now with Y2K hanging over our heads. I'll be glad when this millennium business is over and we can get on with life again--life that doesn’t climax in some ultimate fate but just keeps on as the world turns.

Unfortunately, our culture seems fixated on endings. Eschatology, which is any religion or doctrine concerned with endings, final judgements, etc, is entrenched not only in Judeo-Christian culture, but in others as well. Take the Hopi and Mayan prophecies for instance, or the elaborate cycles of world creation and obliteration presented in Hindu mythology. Prophecies and predictions are found throughout the world, but primarily in certain types of cultures. For some pretty clear reasons, eschatological cultures have their roots in the early agricultural civilizations.

First of all, agricultural civilizations did not tend to last. Either they were not sustainable and created ecological collapse (like the Mayans) or they were successful and became tempting targets for takeovers. Their cities were sacked and burned by conquerors (Jericho, Babylon, Troy--just about every city in the ancient Near East).

Second, some agricultural civilizations endured long enough to allow for very sophisticated astronomical observations to be made with the aid of stone monuments like circles and henges. These observations revealed a new view of time by discovering the precession of the equinoxes. Due to precession of the earth’s axis (the little wobble in its spin--like a top), the annual position of the constellations in the sky shifts over a 26,000 year cycle. For instance, 10,000 years from now, an entirely different star--not Polaris will be in the position of north star. By fixing the position of the sun and marking its relation to a particular constellation at sunrise on the spring equinox, the henges measured the progress of the heavens.

What these observations meant for human culture and religion was revolutionary. For 100,000 years or more before settled agriculture, life was governed by the cycles of the moon. The phases of the moon influenced animal behavior and determined hunting and fishing schedules. The moon also had the awesome property of synchronizing the menstrual cycles of women--a cosmic significance that inspired the goddess religions. But most importantly, the moon didn’t change over any deep time cycle and the hunting and gathering way of life didn’t change for hundreds of millennia and the most important thing was to keep returning, over and over to the same cyclic processes of life.

Ancient peoples had a horror of progress as documented by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return. The ever-returning cycle meant stability and security for people. To change the way one did things was risky business and could fail. But as agricultural civilizations became established for longer and longer periods, the new astronomical observations provided an ideology of progress. Whether or not the longer 26,000 year cycle was apparent to them, ancient astronomers saw changes in the sky (about 1 degree every 72 years), and no one really knew where it was all headed. It was easy to assume the worst, and religions prophesied the end of the world in conflagration or deluge.

The ideology of progress created a new psychological state that fostered the comparatively rapid technological changes of the bronze and iron ages. But such ideologies can also rationalize the destruction of the world. After all, if it’s written in the stars, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway, so we might as well keep accumulating stuff and having a good time--especially if we are profiting from the current situation.

Millennarism also has its attractions for those who are not doing well in the stratified societies that agricultural civilization (and industrial civilization) produces. Stephen J. Gould, in his book Millennium, describes the millennium fever that seized early Christians--an undertrodden class, who believed that the thousand-year reign of God was at hand. Originally predicted to occur shortly after Jesus’ death, the Christian millennium is now long overdue and actually has no scriptural connection to years ending in triple zeros.

And what of Y2K? It’s an eerie convergence of eschatological ideology and technological blunder. But ultimately it’s just another glitch in the machine of the human enterprise, which like all well functioning machines must move in cycles. What occurs to me is that tales of the end of the world are not helpful just now. We need to focus on restoring the cycles of the earth that our enterprise has disrupted. That is best done by applying the ecological knowledge that we have acquired but that is languishing in libraries and other data storehouses, unused because unlike grain and microchips it is unprofitable by current accounting.

It’s not too late to restore the ancient cycles. Life will go on, and if we start thinking seriously about the fate of our grandchildren and the grandchildren of frogs and trees and salmon, we will even have a reason to live.